Was Lazarus an earthman?
- Thread starter Grant
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He was supposed to be an alien from an advanced but now-destroyed time-traveling civilization, although the time-travel angle was mentioned in passing and then ignored because it's a really stupid and incoherent episode.
What scene is that mentioned in? I have watched it many times but they also refer to him as human at one point.
Oh god, I may have to watch it again to look for exact references to his origin!
Thank goodness--I found the Memory Alpha article and the last line states that they refer to him as human.
http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Lazarus
Episode transcript: http://www.chakoteya.net/StarTrek/20.htm
I take "my Earth" to mean "my home just as Earth is your home."
And yes, he is called human a couple of times early on, but you can find lots of '50s and '60s science fiction that featured humanlike aliens and blurred the lines between "human" and "humanoid." A lot of stories treated alien worlds as parallel Earths that just happened to have some difference in their history; indeed, this was a foundational premise of TOS itself, as seen in "Miri," "Bread and Circuses," and elsewhere. So who knows, maybe he did mean "my Earth" in a more literal sense -- not the same Earth that Kirk and McCoy came from, but an alien Earth with its own human beings, like so many others in TOS and pulp sci-fi in general.
Then again, as I said, it's such an incoherent, self-contradictory script that it's hard to tell what the writer intended.
Exactly. I am not sure if the writer even knew or cared if Lazarus was an actual Earthman from another dimension of just an alien from another planet who just looked exactly like a human!
I lean toward the former since up to that point TOS had NOT shown any alien race where they had exact human appearance.
As I just mentioned in your other thread, Lazarus says in the passage I quoted above that he's a native of the planet the ship is currently circling. He's used his time-travel capability to chase his counterpart into his planet's distant future, which is our present, and his struggle against his counterpart was responsible for destroying that planet's civilization in both universes. So he explicitly was not of Earthly ancestry.
Yeah, now I do remember that line. Thanks.
Definitely not human if for no other reason than his wispy beard growing and disappearing! Humanoid though!
JB
JB
A humanoid alien, like so many in the Trek universe
I think the episode has a lot of charm, with an interesting story. The ending is quite poignant, with good Lazarus making a great personal sacrifice.
Appearance-wise, the inhabitants of Beta Three in "Return of the Archons" and the people of Eminiar Seven in "A Taste of Armageddon" were indistinguishable from Earth humans. There was no indication that either race was non-native to their respective planets.
The caretaker who appears at the end of "Shore Leave" looks pretty human to me.
Balok in "The Corbomite Maneuver" looked human -- well, like a seven-year-old human child with a bald skullcap and wonky teeth.
Trelane in "The Squire of Gothos" appeared human, but since he was an omnipotent being, we can assume he had the power to take on any shape at will.
Same for the human-looking Metron we see in "Arena." The Metrons are such powerful beings that they can probably appear in any form or guise they wish.
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A needless one. Kirk could just have destroyed the timeship for one thing, or, even more decisively, phaser one Lazarus to atoms. In fact, if the two universes were really in so much danger, why would sane-ish Lazarus not just off himself?
Of course, the story couldn't possibly have happened as shown, because it contradicted what TOS had already established about antimatter. It claimed that if matter and antimatter ever met, it would annihilate two whole universes -- but "The Naked Time" had already established that the ship's own engines used matter and antimatter. (Not even getting into the idiocy that the reaction only happens if identical people meet, rather than particles and their antiparticles.) "Alternative" ignored this and operated on the assumption that dilithium crystals were the ship's power source, rather than merely a means of channelling ship's power, as "Mudd's Women" had already established (under the name "lithium crystals"). So the "danger" is complete nonsense.
Well, here's a question. Does someone have to be from Earth to be "human"? Can the Eminians be considered human even though they are native to their world? Are we saying Human must equal Terran? I know that there are many colonies established by Earth in the Federation, they would be Humans of Terran ancestry, but what about other planets like Argelius II, where they are not an Earth colony?
Human is a species. So it would be matter of genetics, not what planet one is from that determines if someone is human. Eminians would have to be descended from Humans to be Human. Same for Argelians.
I take it you mean, does their species have to originate on Earth to count as human? (Since humans could colonize other planets and have children there.) Biologically speaking, sure, "human" means a member of Homo sapiens. However, a lot of science fiction writers, especially in the '60s and earlier, used the term "human" for humanlike beings on other worlds. Go back to the age of Jules Verne, and you see the expectation that we would find "men" on the Moon, Mars, etc. just as we had found them on every habitable land mass on Earth. An outgrowth of the idea that humanity is the center of the universe, created in God's image, etc. is the assumption that all intelligence is human. So you see a ton of early science fiction with essentially human beings living on alien worlds, albeit sometimes exotic human "races" like the red-skinned Barsoomians of Edgar Rice Burroughs (who coexisted with other, more alien species).
And there was a weird strain of science fiction writers who accepted the idea that human beings, alone (or nearly alone) of Earth's fauna, were from space and therefore our extraterrestrial cousins may still be around. Heck, Larry Niven --- who should have known better --- even made it the central gimmick behind his Human Protectors, in 1967 (!) and has been stuck with it for Known Space stories since.
(I suppose he doesn't feel particularly stuck, since the idea offers fertile story potential and he's had some success in his writing career.)
The question then becomes, is that planet Earth or not? All the way back in "Miri", the answer was rendered less than clear-cut...
We could argue that our heroes only liken the situation to antimatter annihilation reactions. Spock would state that there are two universes that are opposites to each other, and then go on to say "more specifically" that they are like matter and antimatter to each other.
Now, that part goes slightly against what Spock literally says - but he could be dumbing it down for Kirk. What Kirk then says is perfectly valid: matter and antimatter put together go boom. Spock then expands that under certain special conditions involving identical particles, something special happens (with this antimatter analogy), but he is cut off before we learn what this special thing is. Kirk sums it up as total annihilation of everything, and Spock goes along with that.
Who knows, perhaps 23rd century science has uncovered interesting new aspects about what happens when identical particles of matter and antimatter meet? Something must give, for antimatter to behave the way it does everywhere else in Trek.
Sometimes... But Bugs Bunny and Donald Duck have been "human" often enough, too. It's difficult to establish a difference between generic and specific when we only have one real example of a sentient and sapient species around, but generic tends to triumph in any fiction that adds to the number of sentients.
Timo Saloniemi
It was a popular conceit back then, part of the culture. It isn't necessarily that Niven believed it, but that he found a useful story idea in it.
The idea is still often found in mass-media space fantasy, e.g. Battlestar Galactica and Jupiter Ascending, though I doubt any self-respecting prose SF writer today would sink to using it if they didn't already have the clout of a Niven.
One of the weirdest things about Iain M. Banks's Culture novels is that their "humans" are not Earth humans, but a mix of four or five different humanoid species that evolved independently elsewhere in the galaxy. Earth humans are native to Earth, but we're not the only species that's evolved in this form. There's even a story where the Culture makes contact with 20th-century Earth and a couple of its "human" members go among us in disguise before open contact is finally made. It's strange to see such an old-fashioned conceit in a modern prose series featuring some of the most cutting-edge concepts and storytelling in modern SF.
The presence of all these "aliens" that appeared exactly human got me wondering a while back - what if they were that; precisely human?
It's accepted science that time and space are linked, and warping one can affect the other. Then there's casual way in which Spock mentions the "time warp" in Tomorrow Is Yesterday and I have to wonder if time distortions (and by extension, time travel) are just one of those given risks associated with Warp travel. Modern Warp Engines would be finely tuned to avoid this of course, but in the early days of space colonialism I expect there were many ships (with more primitive FTL systems) that were lost without a trace, presumed destroyed through engine malfunction. It would not have been for decades or even centuries later that the truth is uncovered - the colony ships were not lost, but sent backwards in time.
The exact number of years they were displaced by need not have been constant and could have ranged from decades to centuries or even millennia. The result is that there are numerous planets populated by what might biologically be called humans, but are so culturally (or even technologically) estranged from their planet of origin that they are to most intents and purposes an alien race. After all, the Warhammer 40k universe has several species of "aliens" that started off as Terran humans.
In a slightly unrelated note, this might explain why Kirk feels he has the right to interfere in so many of the societies he visits each week, if their distant ancestry is indeed his own species.
Just wondering...
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